I'm director of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at the Cronkite School at Arizona State. I'm also author of the Forbes eBook Curbing Cars: America's Independence From The Auto Industry. I was Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times, and led Changing Gears, a public media project that studied the industrial Midwest. E: vmaynard@umich.edu T @mickimaynard @curbingcars

One single refinery, Carbon Green Bioenergy, outside Lake Odessa, Mich., helps tell the story. “This was built as a 40 million plant,” says the owner, Mitch Miller. “We’re running at 50 million gallons a year. So, we have not reduced capacity at all.”

The demand, Dwyer reports, isn’t because of E85.

It’s because conventional gasoline contains 10 percent ethanol. Last year, for the first time, more corn was used to produce ethanol than as livestock feed. Of course, livestock farmers aren’t happy, since their cost for feed has gone up.

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West Texas Intermediate crude oil has as far back as anybody can remember, has always sold at a 6% to 8% PREMIUM to North Sea Brent crude (basically, the price paid for oil coming from anywhere in the World other than the U.S.). IN 2011 WTI SOLD FOR 14% LESS THAN NORTH SEA BRENT, on average. That’s a total price swing of 20%. Yes, that’s what I said: TWENTY percent.

Now how did THAT happen? It happened because ethanol is supplying a little over 10% of our light transportation fuel needs – that’s why. Thus, ethanol is reducing the demand for gasoline in the U.S. The premium that WTI USED TO SELL AT relative to NSB started to shrink ‘magically’ about the time we started to produce ethanol in a significant volume (about 2005).

Then, in 2011, a risk of supply shortages started to be applied by speculators to the price of oil, first because of the Arab Spring and then even more-so because of the concerns over Iran’s development of a missile deliverable nuclear weapon. This magnified the impact of ethanol as the price of oil world-wide started to be bid up by speculators.

So, applying a 20% reduction in the price of oil to just the oil supplied by domestic sources that means ethanol saved drivers about $40 BILLION in 2011.

Of course, more could be done. We continue to use ethanol in detuned Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) – not taking advantage of ethanol’s high octane property (115 octane for 100% ethanol) relative to gasoline (92-93 high test). An engine designed by three MIT scientists, called the Ethanol enabled Direct Injection engine (EDIE) can achieve 30% BETTER fuel efficiency than a typical gasoline powered ICE, using only 5% ETHANOL – yes, that’s FIVE percent! The rest of the fuel is gasoline. The engine can be mass produced at a marginal cost of about $1,000 to $1,500. Thus you get fuel efficiency gains comparable to a conventional hybrid at about one FOURTH the cost!

see: http://www.ethanolboost.com/

Since the engine uses only 5% ethanol (directly injected) if all the cars on the road were equipped with this engine we could supply them all the ethanol they needed and still have 5% of the fuel supply left over to blend with the gasoline. A 30% gain in fuel efficiency means a 23% reduction in fuel consumption. So, if all cars on the road were equipped with this engine we would achieve a 23% reduction in total gasoline consumption – plus with another 5% of the total gasoline supply displaced by ethanol through blending that would yield a 28% reduction in total gasoline consumption. Imagine what THAT would do to gasoline prices.

Apparently, few people have thought of this,but perhaps it’s a little more apparent now – the price of oil is going to climb so fast – long before we get enough electric cars on the road to make much difference ( in terms of reduced gasoline consumption) – that our economy will be adversely affected leading to lower growth and higher unemployment. This will put the adoption of electric car technology even further out into the future.

What we need are ways of reducing our gasoline consumption in LESS THAN the 20 to 25 years that it will take (under the best of economic conditions) to get enough electric cars on the road to appreciably impact gasoline consumption. MIT’s Ethanol Enabled Direct Injection Engine (EDIE) is the most promising approach currently available and currently being ignored.

The current dogma that using any approach involving ethanol will lead to our damnation is consigning us to a much hotter and more desperate future.

Of course, more could be done. We continue to use ethanol in detuned Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) – not taking advantage of ethanol’s high octane property (115 octane for 100% ethanol) relative to gasoline (92-93 high test).

An engine designed by three MIT scientists, called the Ethanol enabled Direct Injection engine (EDIE) can achieve 30% BETTER fuel efficiency than a typical gasoline powered ICE, using only 5% ETHANOL – yes, that’s FIVE percent! The rest of the fuel is gasoline. The engine can be mass produced at a marginal cost of about $1,000 to $1,500. Thus you get fuel efficiency gains comparable to a conventional hybrid at about one FOURTH the cost!

see: http://www.ethanolboost.com/

Since the engine uses only 5% ethanol (directly injected) if all the cars on the road were equipped with this engine we could supply them all the ethanol they needed and still have 5% of the fuel supply left over to blend with the gasoline. A 30% gain in fuel efficiency means a 23% reduction in fuel consumption. So, if all cars on the road were equipped with this engine we would achieve a 23% reduction in total gasoline consumption – plus with another 5% of the total gasoline supply displaced by ethanol through blending that would yield a 28% reduction in total gasoline consumption. Imagine what THAT would do to gasoline prices.

Apparently, few people have thought of this,but perhaps it’s a little more apparent now – the price of oil is going to climb so fast – long before we get enough electric cars on the road to make much difference ( in terms of reduced gasoline consumption) – that our economy will be adversely affected leading to lower growth and higher unemployment. This will put the adoption of electric car technology even further out into the future.

What we need are ways of reducing our gasoline consumption in LESS THAN the 20 to 25 years that it will take (under the best of economic conditions) to get enough electric cars on the road to appreciably impact gasoline consumption. MIT’s Ethanol Enabled Direct Injection Engine (EDIE) is the most promising approach currently available and currently being ignored.

The current dogma that using any approach involving ethanol will lead to our damnation is consigning us to a much hotter and more desperate future.

I may have seen a larger pile of BS than this Ethanol video… but for the life of me, I can’t remember when. It looks like it’s aimed at school children.

This propaganda video leaves out every vital fact necessary to really understand just how BIG and EXPENSIVE the Ethanol LIE really is and the horror these “Ethanol Pushers” are saddling the American taxpayer with.

—–” This propaganda video leaves out every vital fact necessary to really understand just how BIG and EXPENSIVE the Ethanol LIE really is and the horror these “Ethanol Pushers” are saddling the American taxpayer with.”——-